kabdib

79 ms·

871.
by kabdib 9y ago
The Studio buildings at MS were open plan when we moved in. Pods of six people sat in a kind giant cubical corraled by high walls, with these "six-packs" strung down the length of the building's wing. Managers and the privile
872.
by kabdib 9y ago
I worked in a similar environment at Apple, when Infinite Loop first opened: Pods with offices that surrounded a central courtyard, which was furnished with sofas, chairs and whiteboards. Each office had a simple (and heavy) door alongside
873.
by kabdib 9y ago
In Gene Wolfe's SF/fantasy tetralogy The Book of the New Sun , set very far in the future, he refers to corpses preserved by extreme means and rendered essentially indestructible and basically just cluttering up the world.
874.
by kabdib 9y ago
"You'll nevah woik in dis bidness again..." Frankly, when you tell a room full of people about something it's practically guaranteed to leak. The exceptions seem to be (a) secrets nobody cares about ("We're rew
875.
by kabdib 9y ago
It's been nearly 20 years and hard to remember. I think it was called Continuus, but that they changed their name. A sibling comment refers to 'Synergy' and that sounds right. Just another proof that if a product involves the
876.
by kabdib 9y ago
I've seen MediaWikia and Confluence used successfully. It does require culture . . . but I've noticed that more people use the friendlier tool and that we have a lot more documentation with Confluence. The MediaWiki stuff was okay
877.
by kabdib 9y ago
I think I've used the source code control system mentioned in the article. It was indeed a pile of garbage. Took a couple days of training in it, and the folks running the class kept telling us not to use certain checkboxes and feature
878.
by kabdib 9y ago
It was fun to see products that I helped ship wind up on the shelves at Weird Stuff. Kind of a sideways honor . . .
879.
by kabdib 9y ago
I really like the 3rd edition of The Art of Electronics . The text is a fun read, and the student manual is a great extension of the main text, with a bunch of practical insight and discussion that puts it beyond mere exercises. Caveat: I&
880.
by kabdib 9y ago
We played that, too. At 300 baud and a significant transatlantic delay, the typical interaction was: - log in, read the usual You're-at-end-of-road-again stuff - walk a few rooms (delay, delay . . .) - find out you were killed by som
881.
by kabdib 9y ago
For a fictional treatment of converting a society to base 12, Leo Frankowski's High Tech Knight series is a lighthearted and fun read (starts with The Crosstime Engineer ). [I didn't like the books past the original 4, YMMV]
882.
by kabdib 9y ago
It might have been closer to $35, I'd have to dig a little. Remember, this is with the SFPs, not just the raw fiber (which is significantly cheaper on its own, even if you buy it terminated).
883.
by kabdib 9y ago
Last time I bought some 10Gbit fiber (some AOC, the stuff with SFPs on both ends) it was about $70 for a 3 meter cable. Amortized cost of switch ports are maybe another $200. You paid $700 for a 10Gbit networking card with (say) four ports
884.
by kabdib 9y ago
... which is why you provision servers and design your software and network architecture to take the demand (latency, bandwidth, etc.) into account. Data rates for online games are pretty predictable. A 10 Gbit fiber connection to a racked
885.
by kabdib 9y ago
If you changed TCP sufficiently to make it a real-time protocol suitable for gaming, it wouldn't be TCP any more. Reliable streaming and real-time packet delivery are two completely different animals. I would argue that bandwidth-shari
886.
by kabdib 9y ago
It's incredibly easy to make bread. It's not even labor-intensive or expensive: You can often find used bread machines at a second-hand shop for about ten dollars, and the ingredients for a loaf of bread are a fraction the cost of
887.
by kabdib 9y ago
Most of the projects I've worked on have had making money as a root motivation. "By doing X, Y and Z you'll make more money", with evidence and a reasonable plan, is a decent argument. I've made these pitches as a l
888.
by kabdib 9y ago
That's fine -- the Python folks have their own share of religious wars (starting with: tabs, or spaces?) :-)
889.
by kabdib 9y ago
Law enforcement also has a legitimate interest in being able to walk into my house, examine and copy my stuff, and make sure I'm not doing anything against the law. They also have a legitimate interest in stopping me on the street at r
890.
by kabdib 9y ago
Games are perceived to be date-driven hits. So there is a "magic date" you need to meet -- a major holiday, for instance, or a big industry event like E3 -- or your project is "toast". So you wind up with crunch time, an
891.
by kabdib 9y ago
Point taken. Though "call by name" still makes me twitch :-)
892.
by kabdib 9y ago
I learned C and LISP pretty much at the same time (back when rocks were young and you needed a PDP-11 if you wanted to run Unix). Then I went to college and the first course in the Computer Science major was a "killer" they taught
893.
by kabdib 9y ago
I stopped buying things like motherboards, RAM and so forth from Frys quite some time ago. Just too much stuff was returns, and not marked so. (I once bought a desktop computer from them. It was, unsurprisingly, busted -- it wouldn't b
894.
by kabdib 9y ago
I wrote my first game (in assembly language) on an Atari 400, because it was all I could afford on my college student budget. It was a fun machine to program. You could get into a zone on the keyboard where you just tapped lightly and could
895.
by kabdib 9y ago
Infringe a patent, and the holder of the patent can be awarded damages. We're familiar with that. Knowingly infringing a patent can bring triple damages. You can bet that the USPTO granted someone a patent on the linked list, or a co
896.
by kabdib 9y ago
I once spent several months reading a certain set of patents. This was sanctioned by the lawyers of the company I was working for then. A few comments: - Patents are supposed to "teach" things. Yet in every place I've worke
897.
by kabdib 9y ago
Duplicity is the name of the game in Enterprisey software. Whether you're a startup struggling to add the features that a client requested, that sales said "Of course we can!" to, and that are utterly foreign to your product
898.
by kabdib 9y ago
That candidate showed remarkable common sense.
899.
by kabdib 9y ago
When I last "dealt with" PeopleSoft, the standard operating procedure was: 1) Pay PeopleSoft/Oracle a metric f--kton of money. 2) A CD arrives in the mail. (This little envelope cost $800,000?) 3) Your PeopleSoft consultants
900.
by kabdib 9y ago
Was not surprised to see Oracle and PeopleSoft involved. I hope they get the crap sued out of them. That stuff is toxic, and I pity any organization that Oracle got its claws into using that junk.

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